I'm interested in the environment in a very hands on way. I like to camp, fish, hunt, and hike. I spend thousands of dollars playing outside every year from my annual fishing trip to Alaska for salmon and halibut, to catch and release trout fishing in the Rockies, to hunting big game in the high country. I love the outdoors and enjoy sharing my love with my sons.
Anyone who spends any amount of time outdoors has noticed things are changing. The elk are coming down from the high country later. You can hunt above 8000 feet into December now. The elk's migration routes are starting to change. The salmon are coming in a little earlier, the runoff peaks earlier and the rivers and streams run lower sooner in Colorado. Snowfields that were there in 1991 in August haven't been around for a while near Longs Peak in Rocky Mountain National Park.
So, I'm reading the NY Times and I run across this article From a Rapt Audience, a Call to Cool the Hype by William J. Broad. I read the article. I read it again. Somethings wrong with this article.
Then it hits me. It's the current version of the "Al Gore lies/exaggerates" meme applied to "An Inconvienient Truth" combined with the practice of "balanced journalism."
Hollywood has a thing for Al Gore and his three-alarm film on global warming, “An Inconvenient Truth,” which won an Academy Award for best documentary. So do many environmentalists, who praise him as a visionary, and many scientists, who laud him for raising public awareness of climate change.
But part of his scientific audience is uneasy. In talks, articles and blog entries that have appeared since his film and accompanying book came out last year, these scientists argue that some of Mr. Gore’s central points are exaggerated and erroneous. They are alarmed, some say, at what they call his alarmism.
You'd expect with an opening like that the article is going to skewer Gore's argument that humans are causing global warming and we need to change our ways to stop it. You would be wrong. Six paragraphs later, Broad writes:
Typically, the concern is not over the existence of climate change, or the idea that the human production of heat-trapping gases is partly or largely to blame for the globe’s recent warming. The question is whether Mr. Gore has gone beyond the scientific evidence.
Okay, maybe he conclusions are correct, but he IS fabricating his evidence. Except no where does Broad point to anything that isn't based on a scientific analysis that is accepted by my some major portion of the scientific community.
The big whopper that Gore tells is caught by Broad and Gores leading critic in the article, Don J. Easterbrook, an emeritus professor of geology at Western Washington University.
In October, Dr. Easterbrook made similar points at the geological society meeting in Philadelphia. He hotly disputed Mr. Gore’s claim that “our civilization has never experienced any environmental shift remotely similar to this” threatened change.
Nonsense, Dr. Easterbrook told the crowded session. He flashed a slide that showed temperature trends for the past 15,000 years. It highlighted 10 large swings, including the medieval warm period. These shifts, he said, were up to “20 times greater than the warming in the past century.”
Gotcha! Gore, you lying bastard. Except, I missed the part of modern civilizations history where we experienced one of these trends. Our global economy somehow seems different from what was going on globally during the medieval period. The other thing is everything sans human activity points to the fact that we should actually be in a cooling period right now according to the rest of Easterbrook's data.
Broad does balance it out in the end:
Michael Oppenheimer, a professor of geosciences and international affairs at Princeton who advised Mr. Gore on the book and movie, said that reasonable scientists disagreed on the malaria issue and other points that the critics had raised. In general, he said, Mr. Gore had distinguished himself for integrity.
“On balance, he did quite well — a credible and entertaining job on a difficult subject,” Dr. Oppenheimer said. “For that, he deserves a lot of credit. If you rake him over the coals, you’re going to find people who disagree. But in terms of the big picture, he got it right.”
I'm sick of this shit. It reminds me of a bunch of herion addicts watching their friend OD. "It'll be fine dude. You're freaking out. Your're being a buzz kill. Uh..Uh.. dude he quit breathing."
